darkness visible

william styron died a few days ago. he wrote the oft-noted memoir of his own struggle with depression, Darkness Visible. I had to read it for a psychology class in college; i remember it because i wasn't all that impressed. i had the thought then: i could have written this. it must have been november.

a few days ago, my nana also died, after 5 years of a significant trip with alzheimer's disease. significant for her, i'm sure, but i can't say how. she was in her own world most of the time, and i like to think that she spent those years working through the final pages of incomplete stories from her past, resolving all the pieces that she kept in the marrow of her bones for most of her life, the marrow that fed the underlying sadness in her sighs and the puddles of her blue eyes. my nana--lover of blueberries, cheerleader to young writers, singer of spontaneous odes to birds, sunshine, and grandchildren--was no stranger to depression either.

it seems like there needs to be a time for all of us to come up against our sadness. we may find ourselves writing about it, as styron did, or singing about it (now i listen to chris pureka exploring hers), or spending the last years of our lives unraveling it...and then, for many of us, there's winter. there's not much like walking amidst the growing shadows of sunfall at 4:30 in the afternoon to conjure the keepers of the dam into opening the gates. the once-fertile fields of summer are now fair estate for floodplains of tears.

i'm much more present to the necessity of cycles than i have been over the course of my life, and so i feel no threat of my own depression. i spent years there, avoiding the give and take of seasons, the giving and receiving of light and darkness, sun and soil, gratitude and introspection. and then i hid in cities, cloistered from the mild affects of change--only startled awake by the seldom shutdown of systems that moved me from home to work, wet to dry, dark to light. finally there was coastal california, where i began to reintegrate cycles into my reality, watching death create life, soil become food, flesh become soil, isolation yield to intimacy, intimacy to honesty, honesty to growth, and then growth to isolation. still, i was spared the intensity of dramatic seasonal change. that's my work here.

it is SO dark at night here. the mountains block the sun in the mornings and mid afternoons, diffusing the light into a sort of stagnant glow. when the sun is overhead, its abundance is overwhelming--the lack of atmosphere and moisture results in an explosion of vibrational energy--sunlight permeates EVERYTHING. it's hard to remember and receive the inner light that every other thing (besides the sun) also radiates. the resulting consequence of this momentary forgetfulness is that, when the darkness comes, one has to go deep inside to reacquaint with one's own light. accordingly then, everyone seems further away. and it's painful, the constant ebb and flow of potent tides of external and internal, of extreme light and extreme dark. but at least there's no possibility of freezing up, as long as you go with it all.

it seems that the poignancy of life has found me. and with it, i welcome the challenge of winter. i'll ricochet with the sunbeams across the desert landscape, playing with the fleeting moments of day, and then i'll count all the stars in the darkest of nights, and find the one inside me, too.